Today’s Double-Speak Translation

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building…

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

By “value-added,” the CRU means raw data where arbitrary scaling factors and adjustments have been added to the data in a totally opaque and non-replicable sort of way. From past experience in other locations (see this post on New Zealand and the US), the adjustments to the raw data tend to drive 80-100% of the global warming signal. In other words, in areas where we have been able to check, these data adjustments account for 80+% of what the scientists call “global warming.” Without these adjustments, warming has been more modest or non-existent.

By destroying the raw data and thereby hiding the amount of massaging and adjustment that has been made to the data (“value add”) we are therefore unlike to be able to scrutinize the source of 80% of the warming signal. More from Anthony Watts here.

Update: This does not mean that there has been no warming, just that it has been exaggerated. Satellites have shown warming over the last 30 years and are unaffected by the same biases and issues as at the CRU. But the whole point is the exaggeration. Skeptics generally don’t think there is no warming from man’s CO2, just that it is greatly exaggerated. And this matters. Ten degrees of warming vs. a half degree of warming over the next century have very very different policy implications. See my video here for more.

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It was good to see you again yesterday – if briefly. One particular thing you said – and we agreed – was about the IPCC reports and the broader climate negotiations were working to the globalisation agenda driven by organisations like the WTO. So my first question is do you have anything written or published, or know of anything particularly on this subject, which talks about this in more detail?

My second question is that I am invovled in a working group organising a climate justice summit in the Hague and I wondered if you had any contacts, ngos or individuals, with whom you have worked especially from the small island States or similar areas, who could be invited as a voice either to help on the working group and/or to invite to speak?

Mick is Dr Mick Kelly with the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Nothing like government funded leftist scientists working closely with leftist political groups to build a UN run climate justice system.

Jim Turner

If they have the ‘value added’ data, and the algorithms used to ‘add value’, then presumably they are able to subtract the ‘value’ and regenerate the original ‘value deficient data’.
Don’t tell me that they haven’t kept a record of what they did either! It really is incredible that negligent data keeping is offered as a justification for us to believe what they tell us!

stan

How much of the satellite reading has been calibrated to the ground station data that has been massaged?

papertiger

For some time the only available satellite record was the UAH version, which showed cooling globally. A longer data series and several corrections to the UAH method leaves the UAH series showing warming, though less than RSS version. In 2001, an extensive, but now somewhat dated, comparison and discussion of trends from different data sources and periods was given in the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (section 2.2.4)[10].

“New analyses of balloon-borne and satellite measurements of lower- and mid-tropospheric temperature show warming rates that are similar to those of the surface temperature record and are consistent within their respective uncertainties, largely reconciling a discrepancy noted in the TAR.”

A detailed analysis produced by dozens of scientists as part of the US Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) identified and corrected errors in the satellite data and other temperature observations.

The CCSP SAP 1.1 Executive Summary states:

“Previously reported discrepancies between the amount of warming near the surface and higher in the atmosphere have been used to challenge the reliability of climate models and the reality of human induced global warming. Specifically, surface data showed substantial global-average warming, while early versions of satellite and radiosonde data showed little or no warming above the surface. This significant discrepancy no longer exists because errors in the satellite and radiosonde data have been identified and corrected. New data sets have also been developed that do not show such discrepancies.”

“there is no longer a discrepancy in the rate of global average temperature increase for the surface compared with higher levels in the atmosphere.” … “the observed patterns of change over the past 50 years cannot be explained by natural processes alone”.[10]

I’ll tell you the leak I’d like to see.
I’d like to see John Christy’s emails pertaining to CRU thugs fucking up his sat data.
Bet those are some lively notes.

bob

Non existent data don’t exist. That’s that simpele. Manipulated data resting on non existent date are of no value as their basis does not exist. Phil Jones has destroyed man-decades of work at CRU and should be prosecuted for that.

Although we do not have the CRU raw data, we have some of the results from their runs over the raw data, which indicate no twentieth century warming for the period 1897 to present.

Since the urban hot spot effect is readily measurable to give several degrees of warming, the correct approach is to take temperature records from long established weather stations that are at present semi rural. This is most easily done in areas that have long been advanced (therefore white) and are lightly populated – the north, in particular Hudson bay, South Africa, the US, New Zealand and Australia. Brazil might also be good. The North and New Zealand, unadjusted, indicate no twentieth century warming. I am unaware of the the surface temperature data from other likely sources.

For proxy measures of temperature, the two plausibly reliable measures are the treeline and the sea ice area. Sea ice area only goes back to 1978, but treeline data goes all the way back for thousands of years. Research results on the treeline appear to have been suppressed, but the emails reveal suppressed research results showing no twentieth century warming, and medieval warm period substantially warmer than the twentieth century.

bob

Non existent data don’t exist. It’s that simple. Manipulated data resting on non existent data are of no value as their basis does not exist. Phil Jones has destroyed man-decades of work at CRU and should be prosecuted for that.

Reeingeneering of data may be of some help but is no substitute for the original data. Who – in this fraudulent gang – can guarantee for the correct engineering process and what is such a guarantee worth.

The only correct way is to skip CRU (and Hadley) data of the last decades. It is pure phantasy, fiction.

You think that CRU might not be quite done tossing the inconvenient truth in the dumper?

Robert Dammers

Actually, I’ve been thinking about the feedback issue some more. If you recall the graph from the Gore film with CO2 and Temperature plotted against time, once you’ve corrected the timebase (Gore uses an earlier, incorrect version of the chart), you see CO2 neatly following Temperature, with an 800 year lag. Surely the implication of this is that the feedbacks essentially cancel out the temperature effect of CO2 (and other measures have already indicated that there are significant negative feedbacks). So the warmists are right: it is all in the feedbacks. But they are wrong – the effect of the feedbacks is to eliminate (to the limits of statistical accuracy) any temperature effect of CO2 concentration. By contrast, a change in temperature can cause a change in CO2 level (because of enhanced/reduced solubility, for example), but this will not cause further change in temperature. It just is.

Tom Nally

Whatever the magnitude of the current warming — disregarding the fact that we may have entered a cooling period — I’m not yet convinced that apparent increases in atmospheric CO2 and apparent increases in the temperature record are related in the way that some scientists claim.

Suppose there is yet another driver that is causing both observed increases in temperature, and observed increases in CO2? Or, might the temperature increases themselves be causing increases in atmospheric CO2? (This would be causality in reverse to the conventional wisdom.)

If the latter, how might it be taking place? I don’t have a clue, but let me speculate just for sport. Say that there is a residual amount of biological material in the soil substrate…everywhere, all over the earth, wherever there is land. Microbes are constantly consuming and processing this material, and releasing CO2 as a waste product. During warmer temperatures, the rate at which the the biological material is processed is faster than the rate at which it occurs during cooler temperatures. Thus, warm temperatures produce higher measured amounts of atmospheric CO2. Eventually, increasing plant matter may end up consuming this “excess” CO2. But for brief periods (and by “brief”, we might be talking about decades or centuries here) there may be a lag between the excess CO2 and the ability of the growing plant world to consume it.

What is the likelihood that this is indeed the case? Very small, I would say. Yet, the history of science is repleat with examples of truth becoming falsehood, while falsehood becomes truth. Does anybody doubt that?

—Tom Nally, New Orleans

Mark

I have to say that the satellite data is a bit suspect too. As new satellites and equipment have been put up and not shown warming to the extend that scientists would like, their sensors / output have been adjusted to fit the theory.

Most famously in 1998 a new satellite was returning data and could not see any upper atmosphere warming, so the scientists adjusted the data because they claimed the satellite was more orbiting more elliptically then thought and that was effecting the data.

WSJ had an article several years ago documenting that there were 16 changes over 10 years to create an upward bias in equipment / or removing equipment which did not show a bias and 0 downward changes. This is possible, to find 16 mistakes all in one direction, but highly improbable. The article was out a few years ago – I wish I could find it again.